It was left to Lord Scarman, who carried out the only official inquiry into the 1981 inner-city riots, to get to the real cause of the worst urban disorder of the 20th century.

He told Margaret Thatcher in October 1981 that the Brixton riots that summer were "not pre-planned but the spontaneous welling-up of the feelings of angry young men, most of whom were black, against what they saw as a hostile police force".

But by then it was already too late and the official response to the riots had already been set in stone. Michael Heseltine had already been anointed as the new minister for Merseyside to stabilise Liverpool but without any crock of gold and, as the cabinet papers reveal, on what Thatcher's closest advisers considered to be a "doomed mission".

Heseltine, during his two-week visit to Liverpool in the immediate aftermath of the Toxteth riots, had seen the problem for what it was. "There is undoubtedly a serious breakdown of confidence between a great part of the population in the area and the police. In the eyes of many local people, not just in Liverpool 8 this is the dominant issue," he said in his cabinet paper, entitled It took a riot.

The then environment secretary told Thatcher that he had been "horrified" by the attitude of the police. He denied they were racist: they treated all suspects in a brutal and arrogant fashion.

The papers, released by the National Archives, show Thatcher herself had a glimpse of this when she actually spoke to young people who lived in Toxteth but had been shocked at their hostility to the police: "She was not concerned about the colour of their skin, but she was concerned about crime ... she condemned anyone, whatever their colour, who attacked the police and she begged them not to resort to violence nor to live in separate communities."

Once the prospects for economic regeneration and the behaviour of the police were taken off the table, the post-riots debate in 1981 degenerated into a debate over more military equipment for the police and the influence of television in spreading "copycat" riots.

The historical parallels with the aftermath of the 2011 summer riots seem easy to draw. A quick and inconclusive debate about the social roots of the unrest. A new government initiative to tackle gang culture and troubled families is launched, as was Heseltine's inner-city drive, as a singular crusade without any significant new Whitehall funds to back it up. The rioters are dismissed as an "unruly mob" who were "thieving pure and simple".

Instead the law and order response has become the only reaction that commands serious ministerial time and resources. The police are now going through exactly the same debate about the use of water cannon, baton rounds and the possible new powers to create "no-go" areas for rioters that echo a modernised form of the 1714 Riot Act that chief constables concerned about the new "hit and run" tactics being used demanded in 1981.

Nobody died in the riots of 1981 [see footnote]. but more than 800 police officers were injured. Last summer, five people died but only 300 police officers were injured. That doesn't sound like progress.

• This explanatory footnote was added on 4 January 2012: the cabinet papers, pertaining to the main Toxteth riots covering several days in the first half of July 1981, note that nobody died in those riots. During two days of upheavals at the end of July, one resident, David Moore, not a rioter, died after being hit by a police vehicle on its way to street disturbances.